• AI platforms cite Russian and Chinese state media alongside Reddit threads – including r/ShitAmericansSay and r/TrueUnpopularOpinion – when answering questions about Greenland’s sovereignty
• ChatGPT also references four Grok conversations and a Grokipedia article as sources on Greenland
London, 29th Jan, 2026 – Grok. Grokipedia. A Russian state news agency. Two Chinese state media outlets. r/ShitAmericansSay. r/TrueUnpopularOpinion. r/law. A Substack newsletter called Geographic Geoff. A Philippine real estate blog. debuglies.com. These are the sources shaping what AI platforms tell people about Greenland’s sovereignty.
A new audit by Hard Numbers ran 41 questions about Greenland’s sovereignty through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, in the UK and the US. The study found that Reddit is the second most-cited source across all platforms – behind only Wikipedia – with over 85 individual threads appearing as citations. Among them: discussions about the mechanics of annexation, the legality of invasion, and a thread titled “They can take it on a random Tuesday.”
ChatGPT specifically cites four Grok conversation URLs and a page from Grokipedia – an AI-generated reference site – as sources on Greenland. It also draws on TASS, CGTN and Global Times: state media from Russia and China. None of these sources appeared in results from Perplexity or Google AI Overviews. The BBC is the most influential editorial source in both countries, outranking the New York Times nearly 2:1 in the US.
Paul Stollery, Co-Founder of Hard Numbers, says:
AI is starting to eat itself. ChatGPT citing Grok is the information equivalent of a snake eating its own tail – once AI tools start treating each other’s outputs as sources, the quality floor drops and nobody can trace where the original information came from. This isn’t a hypothetical risk. It’s happening right now, on one of the biggest geopolitical stories of the year, and unless you check the citations – which most people don’t – there’s nothing to distinguish a Grok conversation from a Reuters article in the answer you receive.
“What’s most unsettling is that nobody made a deliberate decision to include any of these sources. There’s no editorial policy. No source vetting process. The system just hoovers up whatever’s available – Grok, TASS, r/ShitAmericansSay – and presents it all with equal confidence. A journalist who cited any of these sources in a story about sovereignty wouldn’t make it past the first edit. But there is no edit. There’s no editor. The answer just appears, and people trust it.”
